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The United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) union has staggered from one defeat to the next for many years. Three years ago, the union got a punch in the gut when it was defeated in a recognition vote at Volkswagen (VW) in Tennessee. Friday’s defeat at Nissan was nothing less than a knockout punch ending for the foreseeable future any efforts by the UAW to organize the large, predominately foreign-owned auto assembly plants in the South.

News of the defeat trickled in on Friday night through friends who were present at the vote in Canton, Miss., where Nissan’s sprawling, nearly-mile-long assembly plant is located. More than 60 percent of Nissan’s approximately 3,500 eligible workers voted over a two-day period against the union. Most of us hoped to wake up on Saturday morning to better news, but Nissan—one of the world’s top automakers—beat the UAW hands down. It wasn’t even close.

“It was certainly disappointing news,” Scott Houldieson, the vice-president of UAW Local 551, told me over the phone during his lunch break on Sunday. Houldieson is a 28-year veteran of Ford’s Torrence Ave. assembly plant on Chicago’s far South Side. “A lot us are disappointed. We had high hopes.”

Some saw it coming. A former UAW organizer who requested anonymity, told me this would be the outcome two weeks ago when I asked him about the approaching election. “They’re going to lose two to one,” he told me. He was pretty much on target.

The Nissan defeat won’t be an isolated southern affair for the UAW: It will blow back to the union’s heartland in the Midwest. “We’ve been told for years by Solidarity House, the UAW’s headquarters in Detroit, that we can’t make significant contract gains because our density [the percentage of union workers in a specific industry] was too low to fight the ‘Big Three,’” said Houldieson. “With the defeat at Nissan, we are backsliding.”

The warning signs for losing the Nissan vote were all there for us to see. Three years ago at VW in Chattanooga, Tenn., the UAW lost a vote even though VW was encouraging its workers to vote for the UAW. The German automaker has had a long cooperative relationship with the German trade unions where ‘works councils’—joint management-worker in-plant committees—are present in many workplaces. Under U.S. law, many legal experts would consider such ‘councils’ to be illegal company unions.

It was Tennessee’s aggressive Republican political establishment that intervened in the VW union election with a no-holds-barred campaign to defeat the UAW. Surprisingly, they got some help from then-UAW President Bob King. As Micah Uetricht reported in February 2014:

As powerful right-wing forces flush with cash mounted open opposition, the union refused support from local activists. The UAW did little to counter right-wing threats and scare tactics, and refused to expand the effort into a broader grassroots campaign in support of the union… Many already-unionized Tennessee workers—approached the UAW about coordinating a grassroots community response to the vicious anti-union campaign, but were rebuffed.

It takes quite an arrogant union leadership to refuse the help of friends and lose an election when it doesn’t even have a management opponent.

The UAW did do some things differently with the Nissan campaign, at least outside the plant. The union made a big effort to develop a relationship with religious and community organizations. It crafted its campaign as part of Mississippi’s long and storied Black Freedom struggle with the slogan “Workers’ Rights=Civil Rights.” Scott Houldieson thought this was a “hopeful sign.”

A “March on Mississippi” in support of the Nissan campaign drew more than 6,000 Nissan workers, their families, local supporters, and fellow UAW members from across the country—including 20 Ford workers from Houldieson’s plant—to Canton into hear former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders and actor Danny Glover speak in support of the UAW. It was an impressive turnout for a small southern city.

Unfortunately—unlike at VW—the UAW had an aggressive in-plant management determined to keep it out. Only three of Nissan’s 45 assembly plants around the globe are non-union. The company ran a well-oiled campaign, including captive audience meetings and aggressive one-on-one meetings with employees. These tactics are all perfectly legal under U.S. labor law and have been employed by management for decades. While the UAW filed numerous labor charges against the company, it failed to win the argument on the shop floor.

Reaching for an explanation of their defeat, UAW President Dennis Williams released a statement that read, “Perhaps recognizing they couldn’t keep their workers from joining our union based on the facts, Nissan and its anti-worker allies ran a vicious campaign against its own work force that was comprised of intense scare tactics, misinformation and intimidation.”

Houldieson scoffed at Williams’ excuses and provided another explanation. “The UAW was born when ‘scare tactics and intimidation’ meant goon squads beating union activists, company spies infesting plants and workers being fired at any sign of supporting the union,” he said. “We made our biggest gains for our membership and the whole working class when we were fighting—and we haven’t fought for a long time.”

Could another organizing strategy have won? The former UAW organizer told me:

My personal opinion is that the election route was a flawed strategy. An election is the bosses' game, and a large number of the workers were excluded from the process because they were considered temps. There was never any consideration paid to possibly looking for weak links in the supply chain, organizing there, striking for recognition and trying to leverage Nissan that way.

Nissan is really vulnerable to that kind of thing because they rely on Just-In-Time suppliers, and workers at the suppliers are poorly paid and treated worse that the permanent Original Equipment Manufacturer or OEM workers,” that person continued. “Not organizing get temps was dumb too. Sure, they can't really participate in an NLRB election, but they are important to the production process, tend to be treated and paid a lot worse, and can shut down a line or a department if they are organized.

The UAW strategy never considered organizing for strikes anywhere in the supply chain which is sad. The UAW was formed by militant minorities engaging in sit down strikes, yet that strategy wasn't on the table. Clearly, they forgot all of that history when the put this campaign together.

The UAW has become a prison of its modern history. It has a very long track record of making concessions on wages, benefit, and working conditions to the “Big Three” automakers, along with the new albatross around its neck—the loss of a string of recognition elections.

Hopefully, some of the Nissan organizers will break ranks and tell us the inside story about how this avoidable defeat took place. I’m sure that many on the UAW’s national organizing staff and key organizers on the ground knew the outcome ahead of time but dared not to speak out earlier because they feared retaliation. There is much to learn. We need a UAW Jane McAlevey to come forward.

When the story is finally told, it will likely be one of incompetence, bureaucratic sloth and undemocratic rule at work in the UAW’s defeat. But to get to the bottom of this loss, we will ultimately need to interrogate history. The failure at Nissan is an end product of several longstanding negative historical turning points in the U.S. labor movement including the anti-communist purge of the labor movement in the late 1940s, the failure of the underfunded ‘Operation Dixie,’ and the dominance of business unionism.

We, however, are not prisoners of our history. There is a new socialist movement in this country—as well as a crying need for an industrial strategy. It’s long past time to turn this around. The historic UPS strike of 1997 showed us the way forward. We need to make a change starting now.

See why we’re re-inventing the In These Times magazine, and how you can be part of it.

A former union avoidance consultant, Martin Levitt, wrote a book on how weak current labor law is and how it was "helpful" in defeating unionization. His book was called, Confessions of a Union Buster.

I suspect most employers use every trick in the book to keep the union out in the first place. Why? Because employers think 24/7 about how to become “leaner and meaner.” With respect to the workforce that generally means finding ways to “do more with less.” That is legally what they should do because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors.

“So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is: no they do not.” Nobel Prize winning Economist Milton Friedman, ChemTech, 1974

Milton is not alone in that belief. Here’s some other thoughts earlier on this concept.

“The railroads are not run for the benefit of the dear public. That cry is all nonsense. They are built for men who invest their money and expect to get a fair percentage on the same.” William Henry Vanderbilt, self-described richest man on earth, owner of many railroads and son of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1882

“Any man who pays more for labor than the lowest sum he can get men for is robbing the stockholders. If he can secure men for $6 and pays more, he is stealing from the company.” Stockholder of American Woolen Company, (Lawrence, Massachusetts) told to the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1911

Corporate CEOs know, all things being equal, it is ROI, reported quarterly, that keeps investors and attracts others.

“So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is: no they do not.” Nobel Prize winning Economist Milton Friedman, ChemTech, 1974

So I get that. Combine that economic model with at-will-employment and its clear who gets to UNILATERALLY set and change literally at-will wages, hours, and terms of employment.

And they DO.

They resort to a reverse auction where the lowest bidders get and keep jobs. Here’s some examples of what I mean.

“We can’t get enough white labor to build this railroad, and build it we must, so we’re forced to hire them [Chinese labor]. If you [white laborers] can’t get along with them, we have only one alternative. We’ll let you go and hire nobody but them.” Charles Crocker, company superintendent for the Central Pacific Railroad explaining to white workers why he was forced to hire Chinese immigrants (at a 30 percent savings in labor costs) to build the Western end of the transcontinental railroad. 1865

“We want you to stir up as much bad feeling as you possibly can between the Serbians and the Italians. Spread data among the Serbians that the Italians are going back to work. Call up every question you can in reference to racial hatred between these two nationalities; make them realize to the fullest extent that far better results would be accomplished if they will go back to work. Urge them to go back to work or the Italians will get their jobs.” Interchurch World Movement’s Report on the Steel Strike of 1919.

“…it will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow – the idea of doing more with less so that big business can have more…Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.” John Carson-Palmer, Business Week, October 12, 1974

“Until we get wage levels down much closer to those of the Brazils and Koreas, we cannot pass along productivity gains to workers’ wages and still be competitive.” Stanley Mihelick, Executive VP, Goodyear 1987

“Ideally employers should put every plant they own on a barge so that it could move around the world to take advantage of lower wages.” Jack Welch, former CEO, General Electric Corporation

So, if the maximization of short-term profits is what dominates the economy, then labor unions will always be needed.

With respect to political involvement, my reading of history says unions are active because politics is incapable of leaving unions alone. What do I mean? The first court case dealing with unions was in 1806. The judge could not base his ruling on statutory law, because there was none in 1806. Nevertheless, he ruled against the formation of unions and collective bargaining based upon his sense of “common law,” which is judge-made law.

The passage of the Sherman (1890) and Clayton (1914) Anti-Trust legislation were, according to the discussion in Congress leading to their enactment, had nothing to do with organized labor. And yet both were applied punitively to labor unions.

Additionally, every law creating workplace rights and safeguards (that affect ALL wage earners) were passed with organized labor playing an important role in their passage. Each was opposed by employers, employer associations, and their allies in elected office. Why? Because each directly and indirectly raises the cost of doing business.

Union PAC $, which is $ given to candidates deemed to be friendly to everyday wage earners, is voluntary. It is, as I assume you know, is different than dues money.

BTW, I find your use of “left wing” as a pejorative interesting. The left/right wing terms came from the French Parliament. Those who had power before the French Revolution (aristocracy, military, and the church) sat on the right side of Parliament and the newly enfranchised merchant class sat on the left.

Posted by John Kretzschmar on 2017-08-14 12:02:45

That's nice but I suspect you've never been involved in a real union campaign. I have.

Decertification is nearly impossible. the workers must keep the union even if the majority don't want it. why? Because the law does not allow an employer "help" them to decertify, by financing the effort or even giving them advice. They lose to the big union.

"Without a labor union management has the power to unilaterally set and reset wages, hours and terms of employment."

Except they don't. Management pays the best workers more because they are more productive. If they want to keep them they have to pay them comparable to their competitors. With unions everyone gets paid the same. The only differentiator is seniority. This encourages the workers to be indolent. The good workers leave. Except for industries where there is only ONE union and several companies who ALL agree to the same contract (which situation ceased to exist a few decades ago), unionized companies gradually go out of business.

"When the union negotiates a contract that benefits everyone, the ask that everyone pay her or his fair share seems a reasonable ask. Nevetheless, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) does leave openings for individuals to withdraw from the union and keep their job."

That's bunk. The union doesn't "ask" anything. "Withdrawing" from the union is meaningless because the workers' hard-earned cash goes to the union bosses anyway. The NLRA could be changed so that any union contract only benefits those who claim to be voluntary "members." That would be democracy. I don't see any unions urging it.

And we both know that unions give millions to left-wing politicians without asking any "by your leave" from members. Do the members have an option, as individuals, to reduce their dues by the amount otherwise going to politicians? No I didn't think so.

Unions are a vestige of another time. None of the industries that have come about since 1945--computers and the like--have any meaningful degree of union "representation."

Posted by Bob Fritz on 2017-08-14 07:05:37

corruption Even unions have become corrupt. Often work with management to have strikes just when management would like to cut supply of product. Saves company money, allow for selling of over stocked inventory. Save labor costs.

Not to mention how often Union bosses have stolen pension money.

Posted by Brandon Fouts on 2017-08-13 23:35:18

Bob – Thanks for your response. You are not alone in holding those beliefs. Unfortunately, there is some missing information that I must have assumed as being widely known…which based upon your reply is far from widely known.

It is American as apple pie to give a meaningful voice to those who are without it. So the 13 colonies united in SOLIDARITY (a term used by unions) in order to gain the power needed to break away from the unilateral dictates of the English Parliament. Just as unions unite segments of the workforce to gain the power required to change the dictates permitted by at-will-employment.

I believe government exists to do for us that, which we are unable to do for ourselves…or do well for ourselves. Unions do the same thing when they introduce meaningful democracy into their workplaces. Without a labor union management has the power to unilaterally set and reset wages, hours and terms of employment…just as the English Parliament had the power to dictate the political economy of the Colonies.

Just as the levels of government perform actions that are essential to promoting the general welfare (Preamble to and Article 1 of the Constitution) so unions do the same in the workplace. In the private sector, an employee’s right to assemble and freely speak or the right to due process and just cause are left at the workplace’s doorstop. With a union contract those Constitutional rights enter the workplace.

When the union negotiates a contract that benefits everyone, the ask that everyone pay her or his fair share seems a reasonable ask. Nevetheless, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) does leave openings for individuals to withdraw from the union and keep their job.

Union funds that go to political PACs are the only ones that can be used to support individual candidates. All PAC contributions are different than dues collection and are VOLUNTARY.

The laws to decertify the union are nearly identical to those that must be followed to bring a union into the workplace to begin with. So, if you label them “ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE,” I hope you recognize the same term applies to bringing a union into the workplace to begin with. I recommend you read Marty Levitt’s Confessions of a Union Buster to deepen your knowledge of the NLRA.

Posted by John Kretzschmar on 2017-08-13 11:24:27

If Unions are "American" and democratic, why is their first demand, if they win an election, MANDATORY membership whether individual workers want to belong or not, and MANDATORY extraction of dues from paychecks whether the "members" want to pay dues or not, including MANDATORY contributions to left-wing political hacks and causes with whom the workers may disagree, and MANDATORY continuation of union subjugation no matter if the workers change their minds, the rules for decertification being almost impossible?

A union is like a shoe you can't take off after trying it on, whether it fits or not. there is almost nothing more un-american than big labor.

Posted by Bob Fritz on 2017-08-12 18:32:48

Excellent point.

Posted by Bob Fritz on 2017-08-12 18:26:31

As someone who lived my first 35 years in Mississippi and then moved away after trying and trying to help my fellow inmates (there are a lot of good people FROM MS) it finally dawned on me that instead of calling it Stockholm Syndrome, it should have been called the Southern Syndrome. As evidence I point out that the rich merchant-princes of the CSA were able to get the dirt poor southerners to fight & die for them in the civil war.

The first order of business has to be to deprogram the southern white male from believing that if he just shows 'the man' what he is willing to do for him, he will shower him with enough to survive until tomorrow. (An image of an oft beaten dog should come to mind.)

Posted by Julius Hayden on 2017-08-12 17:52:32

Hey jerrymac90, first a couple of adages to mentally grab hold. if you have the mental acuity.They are propagandized the most who think themselves propagandized the least. The Skeptical Cynic"It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for certain that just ain't so." this one has so often be attributed to Mark Twain it's something that "everybody" knows" for certain... except that "it ain't so"I can't imagine an experienced organizing team could have been so wrong about the anticipated results.Their in-house committee had to be giving the professionals some really bullshit feedback for them to have taken such a surprising shellacking.I was a union activist for 45 years, 24 of them professionally for 24 of those years.One campaign I put together, I had a small committee quietly working in the plant for about seven months before we petitioned for an election. Until the company got the election notice, they had no idea the campaign had been on-going.Then they went into full beast mode.Union avoidance. Shortly before the election three more pros from the International came in for the stretch drive. These guys had even more experience than I. They all said the election was in the bag. My analysis was less rosie. A few of my "in-house committee' were saying , It could be close. My analysis was that they were "whistling as they walked by the cemetery." I'd been with people for 7 months. I knew we were in trouble. It was a plant with some 350 people.... we lost by 35 votes.... the other pros were stunned, I wasn't The "it could be close" was the clue to me. I find it hard to believe that the UAW didn't see this tsunami coming.

Posted by SHAFAR NULLIFIDIAN on 2017-08-11 18:21:44

the "big three" automakers did themselves in with their shoddy products and failure to modernize. I will say that the unions didn't help things much as they seemed only to be concerned with the members bottom line and little care for the future of the industry.

Posted by monkE on 2017-08-11 17:02:14

the problem is the fat cat union "leadership". those at the top are part of the problem now and are not working for the little guy so much as working for themselves. the union movement needs fresh blood with the fire of justice in their veins.

Posted by monkE on 2017-08-11 16:58:57

John: Thank you for your thoughtful (& civil) response to my posting. I think you're wrong, but I will not be able to finish putting together the cogent and well-reasoned response that your posting deserves until tomorrow sometime, so please hang tight until then.

Talk to you soon -

Posted by MrJimm on 2017-08-08 21:22:44

Mr. Jimm thanks for sharing your POV. I believe there seem to be parts of the big picture that are missing from your analysis.

First of all, for 25 years following WWII our nations economic might was never more broadly and fairly shared. Economic inequality that I think we can agree with Marco Rubio has declared a problem for the nation…was minimized. We ALL did better when we ALL did better. That was primarily because union density was so high. For every percentage increase in productivity was offset by a corresponding increase in wages. Both major political parties were advocates for free, democratic, trade unions. Unions were seen as partners with government and business in shaping public policy.

Secondly, let me go all the way back to Abraham Lincoln from his first speech to Congress to help explain the role of labor in creating wealth. “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.”

Thirdly, currently in private sector collective bargaining law, if the employer is UNABLE to afford the pay proposals of the union, it can open its books to prove the union’s proposals would put the company in financial danger. Because no union wants to “kill the goose that lays the golden egg” after examining the books and learning the company is telling the truth about its financial situation, the union will modify its financial proposals.

If however, the employer is bragging to its stockholders about how well its doing, how profitable it is, and then comes to the bargaining table "pleading poverty"…then the union will ask for its fair share of the profits it (according to Lincoln’s analysis) helped create. To me that seems only right.

Lastly, we live in a consumer driven economy. Consumer spending accounts for roughly 2/3 of GDP. That means the best friends of Main Street merchants are well-paid consumers. Because the unionized workforce, when taking into account both industrial and regional differences, it accounts for about a 13.8% wage differential above the non-union sector…unions are good for the economy.

Posted by John Kretzschmar on 2017-08-08 13:31:02

No matter what pay and working conditions Nissan offers, they could ALWAYS be better, and Nissan knew that a union would ALWAYS be asking for more, and threatening to shut the factory down if their demands weren't met, even preventing people who wanted to work there from doing so. And the unions had a long history of doing so in Detroit, and everybody knows this, not to mention that everybody knows what outrageous salaries union officials get paid through union dues.

Nissan built the factory, and then advertised for workers, specifying the wages that would be paid, the conditions (complying with the all the OSHA regulations) under which people would work, and the rules they would have to follow to work there. And workers decided that Nissan would be a better place to work than any other company nearby, and signed up for work there.

Seems like an open and shut case to me.

Posted by MrJimm on 2017-08-08 10:23:46

Unions are as “American as apple pie.” The American Revolution brought democracy to the nation. It gave a voice to the previously voiceless. So, everyday wage earners use their union to exert their voice in join together to work with management in raising levels of fairness and justice above those levels unilaterally imposed by management.

I am astounded that in a nation which so loves democracy that we’re willing to “export” it to other countries, with guns if needed. The only place society turns a blind eye to democracy is in the nation’s workplaces.

Unions are a “public good.” They are the only institution charged with bringing meaningful democracy to the workplace. Union contracts allow for Constitutional rights, like freedom of speech and assembly or the right to due process, to cross the workplace door.

It was unions that brought all of us the weekend. EVERY workplace right and safeguard that humanized the employment relationship was enacted over management opposition with unions playing a significant role in the coalitions that pushed enactment.

Should unions disappear, so would those rights and safeguards. Why? Because management exists to maximize short-term profits for investors, and every right and safeguard directly and indirectly adds to the cost of doing business.

Posted by John Kretzschmar on 2017-08-08 09:10:57

Another typical Liberal/Socialist excuse fest for an abject failure and one that was as predictable as the sun rising in the East. Here's one of the main reasons the UAW and other unions are failing now, and will continue to fail in the future; people aren't blind or stupid.

Southerners have seen what unions in the North did to the Big 3 automakers as well the public sector and anything else they touch and want nothing to do with it.

THAT is the lesson the UAW needs to let sink in.

Posted by jerrymac90 on 2017-08-08 08:29:36

So actor Danny Glover spoke in support of the UAW. The last thing I heard him speak in support of was the socialistic government of Venezuela. So either he mentioned Venezuela and the audience laughed at him, or he deliberately didn't mention Venezuela and the crowd wondered why and put 2 and 2 together.

Posted by MrJimm on 2017-08-07 15:04:10

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